he Significance of 
The Westminster Standards 




LIBRARY, OF CONGRESS. 

Chap 9 .„_____, Copyright No. 

Shelf. \&l-^S 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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THE SIGNIFICANCE 

OF THE 

WESTMINSTER STANDARDS 
AS A CREED 



THE SIGNIFICANCE 

OF THE 

WESTMINSTER STANDARDS 

AS A CREED 

AN ADDRESS 

Delivered before the Presbytery of New York, November S. 
1897. 011 the occasion of the celebration of the 
Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of 
the Completion of the Westmin- 
ster Standards 

BV / 

BENJAMIN B. WARFIELD 

PROFESSOR IN THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY AT PRINCETON 




NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1898 



TWO COPIES KECEWED 




1912 

Copyright, 1898, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



TROW DIRECTORY 
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 
NEW YORK 



Go 

THE PRESBYTERY OF NEW YORK 

AT WHOSE APPOINTMENT IT WAS PREPARED AND BEFORE WHOM IT WAS 
DELIVERED, THIS ADDRESS EN ITS PRINTED FORM IS NOW 

DEDICATED 

WITH AN EXPRESSION OF THE AUTHOR'S SENSE OF THE HONOR CONFERRED 
UPON HIM BY THEIR APPOINTMENT, OF HIS HEARTY PARTICIPATION IN 
THEIR LOVE FOR OUR NOBLE STANDARDS, AND OF HIS EARNEST 
DESIRE THAT THIS ADDRESS, WHICH IS BOTH THEIRS 
AND HIS, MAY BE USED OF GOD IN MAKING KNOWN 
IN WIDER CIRCLES THE TRUE NATURE OF 
OUR STANDARDS AND IN INTRENCHING 
THEM MORE DEEPLY IN OUR 
OWN HEARTS 



THE SIGNIFICANCE 

OF THE 

WESTMINSTER STANDARDS 
AS A CREED 

Fathers and Brethren : — 

It would be difficult for rae adequately to ex- 
press the pleasure which it gives me to respond 
to your invitation to join with you to-day in 
celebrating the fifth jubilee of the gift of the 
Westminster Standards to the world. The task 
you have laid upon me. of seeking to set forth 
the significance of that gift, though it has its 
difficulties arising from its magnitude, cannot 
fail to appeal powerfully to one who has, in all 
sincerity and heartiness, set his hand to these 
Standards as " containing the system of doctrine 
taught in the Holy Scriptures." It is not 
merely a duty but a pleasure to bear witness to 
the truth of God as we apprehend it, and to 
give a reason from time to time for the faith 
that is in us. I cannot, indeed, hope to tell over 
to-day all that the Westminster Standards are to 
us — to unfold in detail all that has for two cen- 



2 



The Significance of 



turies and a half made them precious to a body 
of Christians who have been second to none in 
intelligence of conviction, evangelistic zeal and 
faithfulness of confession. But if I were to 
essay to express in one word what it is in them 
which has proved so perennial a source of 
strength to generation after generation of Chris- 
tian men, and which causes us still to cling to 
them with a devotion no less intelligent than 
passionate, I think I should but voice your own 
conviction were I to say that it is because these 
precious documents appeal to us as but the em- 
bodiment in fitly chosen language of the pure 
gospel of the grace of God. The high value 
that we attach to them and that leads us to 
gather here to-day to remember with gratitude 
before God the men who gave them to us, and 
to thank God for this supreme product of their 
labors, is but the reflection of our conviction that 
in these forms of words we possess the most com- 
plete, the most fully elaborated and carefully 
guarded, the most perfect, and the most vital ex- 
pression that has ever been framed by the hand of 
man, of all that enters into what we call evangel- 
ical religion, and of all that must be safeguarded 
if evangelical religion is t© persist in the world. 

How they came to be this, it is to be my task this 
afternoon to attempt to recall to our remembrance. 



the Westminster Standards 3 



I 

It is a humbling exercise to reflect on the dif- 
ficulty which has been experienced by the gospel 
of God's grace — or evangelical religion, as we 
currently call it nowadays — in establishing and 
preserving itself in the world. The proclama- 
tion of this gospel constitutes the main burden 
of the Scriptural revelation. And, after the 
varied and insistent statement which it received 
at the hands of the great company of inspired 
men whose writings make up the complex of the 
Scriptures — and especially after its rich pro- 
phetic announcement by Isaiah ; its marvellous 
exposition in the language of living fact in the 
fourfold narrative of the life of Jesus ; its 
full dialectical development and explanation by 
Paul, as over against almost every possible mis- 
conception ; its poignant assertion by John, cut 
with the sharpness and polished to the brilliancy 
of a gem — one might well suppose that it had 
been made the permanent possession of men, 
etched into the very substance of human thought 
with such boldness that even he that ran could 
not fail to read it, with such depth that it could 
never again be erased or obscured. But it was 



4 



The Significance of 



not so. There is no other such gulf in the his- 
tory of human thought as that which is cleft be- 
tween the apostolic and the immediately suc- 
ceeding ages. To pass from the latest apostolic 
writings to the earliest compositions of unin- 
spired Christian pens, is to fall through such a 
giddy height that it is no wonder if we rise 
dazed and almost unable to determine our where- 
abouts. Here is the great, fault — as the geolo- 
gists would say — in the history of Christian doc- 
trine. There is every evidence of continuity — 
but, oh, at how much lower a level ! The rich 
vein of evangelical religion has run well-nigh 
out; and, though there are masses of apostolic 
origin lying everywhere, they are but fragments, 
and are evidently only the talus which has fallen 
from the cliffs above and scattered itself over the 
lowered surface. Thus it came about that the 
deposit of divine truth in the apostolic revela- 
tion did not supply the starting-point of the de- 
velopment of doctrine in the church, but has 
rather from the beginning stood before it as the 
goal to which it was painfully to climb. 

Through how many ages men needed to strug- 
gle slowly upward before they even measurably 
recovered the lost elevation ! No doubt the es- 
sence of evangelical religion remained the im- 
plicit possession of every truly Christian heart, 



the Westminster Standards 5 

and this implicit presence of so great a light lent 
a glow to every Christian age. ]STo doubt the 
constituent elements of evangelical doctrine found 
disjointedly more or less explicit recognition at 
the hands of every really great Christian thinker, 
and we may piece these fragments together into 
a mosaic picture of the real Christian heart of 
each period. No doubt there persisted every- 
where and always an instinctive protest, fed by 
the Word and quickened by the demands of the 
Christian life, against the deteriorated concep- 
tions of the day ; and this protest flared up from 
time to time into a flame of vehement resistance 
to some more than usually widespread, or some 
more than usually aggressive, or some more 
than usually deadly assault upon some essen- 
tial element of that truth by which alone men 
could live, and would not be allayed until the 
whole truth in question had been brought to 
clear consciousness and guarded expression. 
Early monuments of such struggles for funda- 
mental elements of evangelical religion we pos- 
sess in those forms of sound words which we 
know as the Isicene Creed and the Chalcedonian 
formulary, in which the evangelical doctrines of 
the Trinity in Unity and of the Person of Christ 
receive such lucid, comprehensive, and circum- 
spect statement as has safeguarded them through 



6 



The Significance of 



all subsequent time, and against every hitherto 
conceivable encroachment of misbelief. But it 
was not until four centuries had dragged by 
that, in reaction upon an incredibly audacious on- 
slaught upon the very core of evangelical relig- 
ion, the Church was enabled to rise upon the 
broad and strong wings of a great religious 
genius, to something like a full -orbed apprehen- 
sion of the treasures she possessed in the gospel 
of God's grace. 

Augustine compassed for her the privilege 
of this splendid vision, and for a season she 
basked in its glory. But what that generation 
thus achieved, it lacked the power fully to se- 
cure for its successors. It fixed its own attain- 
ments in no firmly outlined and detailed formu- 
lary of ecumenical authority ; and it had not 
itself passed away before the lines drawn so 
sharply and boldly by the master-hand of Au- 
gustine began to fade again out of the conscious- 
ness of men. We can trace the increasing ob- 
scuration from age to age. Not more than a cen- 
tury had elapsed before the tenacity and distinct- 
ness with which the gospel in its entirety was 
grasped had so far relaxed, that it was possible 
even for the best Christians of the time, men like 
the great and good Csesarius, to betray it into 
one of those futile and fatal compromises with 



the Westminster Standards 7 

its persistent enemy which have proved in all ages 
the snare of good men and the ruin of the truth. 
No wonder that three centuries later it lay lan- 
guishing and dying in chains in the person of 
one who nobly bore the fit name of the " Ser- 
vant of God," * and to whose honor, as to a light 
shining in a dark place, we should do well to 
pause to pay some grateful tribute to-day. Then 
the pall of ecclesiasticism was dragged over the 
corpse, and the dense primeval night seemed to 
have settled again upon the face of the earth. 

But it is a long night that knows no dawn ; and 
just when the darkness seemed most hopeless, a 
streak of light appears again on the horizon and 
the sun springs suddenly up and climbs the heav- 
ens. The Reformation we call it : Zwingli, Luther, 
Calvin — these are its heralds: and what it really is 
is the gospel of God's grace brought back to earth. 
Ah ! how men greet it ! Crushed under the 
weight of their sin, with nothing but their poor, 
human strength to lift it, and nought reached to 
their help but the hand of a church much too ob- 
viously human, how joyously they welcome again 
the outstretched hand of God ! And how the 
glad news spreads until all Europe is filled with 
its echo, and men everywhere rise from the ashes 
of their despondency, stretch themselves awake, 
* Fulgentius Goteschalcus == 81 illustrious servant of God." 



8 



The Significance of 



put on new courage, and go forward in the hope 
of God. Surely now, we will say, flung into the 
midst of this mass of awakened men, with the 
memory of their despair fresh on them and the 
experience of their deliverance keen in their 
hearts, the gospel has come to stay. But no: the 
clouds at once gather again. Melancthon him- 
self, trusted helper and worthy companion of Lu- 
ther, first systematic expounder of the newly re- 
covered gospel, Melancthon himself readmits the 
old " evil leaven of synergism," and, amid the tur- 
moils that ensue, the Lutheran churches succeed 
in only partially recovering the lost ground. 
They are able, accordingly, to establish them- 
selves, not on the pure gospel of the grace of 
God, but as their Formula Concordice witnesses, 
only on a somewhat neutral territory over which 
the old humanitarianism could urge some sort of 
claim. Thus these churches lost the hope of giv- 
ing its final and complete formulation to the prin- 
ciples of evangelical religion. 

Meanwhile, in the grace of God, better things 
were being wrought by the Reformed. They it 
was who were most cruelly ground under the heel 
of the oppressor ; they it was, consequently, who 
most passionately cast their hearts' hope upon the 
God of salvation. And so, all over the Eef ormed 
world, voices were raised giving expression to the 



the Westminster Standards g 



doctrines of grace with a fulness, a richness, an 
absoluteness never before known. Reformed 
Confessions sprang up everywhere in a luxuriant 
growth, written often by the hands of martyrs, 
wet always with their blood, and each and all de- 
claring through martyr lips, which spoke not only 
in the fear of God but out of ardent love to Him, 
and face to face as dying men with their Judge 
and their Redeemer, all the words of this life. 
It is a century of struggle and suffering which 
is distilled into these Confessions — a century of 
patient endurance and faithful testimony which, 
in their glowing and uncompromising language, 
speaks out, with a firmness and clearness and ful- 
ness never before attained, the principles of 
that gospel by which alone the soul can live, and 
the full sweetness and strength of which men 
taste only in times like those. At last the gos- 
pel had come to its rights ; at last men seemed to 
have laid hold upon it with a clearness of appre- 
hension and an ardor of embrace which could 
never more be loosed. 

But the treasure was not even yet to be re- 
tained without a final and supreme struggle. One 
evil had hitherto been spared the Reformed 
Churches. Every conceivable assault had been 
made upon them from without, but no serious in- 
ternal treason had as yet endangered the purity 



io The Significance of 

of their confession. With the second century of 
their existence even this trial was to fall upon 
them. It came in what we know as the Remon- 
strant Controversy, in which the old humanita- 
rian conceptions, the violent assertion of which 
had been the occasion of Augustine's republica- 
tion of the gospel of grace, and by the more 
measured and subtle working of which evangeli- 
cal religion had been gradually throttled in the 
Latin Church, reappeared in the very bosom of 
the Reformed Churches themselves and jeopard- 
ized the purity of their assertion of the gospel. 
We all know how the new danger was tran- 
scended. Met in ecumenical synod at Dort, the 
Reformed Churches gave renewed and serious 
consideration, in the light of Scripture alone, to 
those elements of evangelical religion to which 
exception had been taken, and with one tongue, 
voicing the testimony of the whole Reformed 
world, bore their solemn witness to them as es- 
sential elements in the gospel of God's grace. 
But the end was not even yet. Transferred to 
English ground the assault was continued for a 
third of a century longer under circumstances 
which gave it the highest conceivable force and 
speciousness. Here sacerdotalism, in the form of 
Anglican prelacy, presented itself in the disguise 
of the Reformed religion itself. Here humani- 



the Westminster Standards 1 1 



tarianism put on the garments of light, allied it- 
self with religious fervor, and ran up by insensi- 
ble stages into a mysticism which confounded 
human claims with the very voice of God. This 
is the meaning of what we call the Puritan Con- 
flict which, from the theological side, was nothing 
else than the last deadly struggle of evangelical 
religion — the gospel of God's grace — to preserve 
itself pure and sweet and clean in the midst of 
the most insidious attacks which could be brought 
against it — attacks, the strength of which resided 
just in the fact that now its old-time foes ap- 
proached it with the sword in hand, indeed, and 
with no loss of their undying hatred, but un- 
der its own banner and clothed in its own uni- 
form. 

It was a battle to the death ; and the arts of 
war could not but be learned in its progress. To 
meet so protean a foe, attacking at every point, 
with weapons of unexampled fineness and tactics 
of unimagined subtlety, a skill of fence and a 
wariness of defence unknown before were nec- 
essarily developed ; and, with them, those high 
qualities which underlie them — keenness of per- 
ception, clearness of vision, firmness of purpose, 
accuracy of aim, precision of movement straight 
to the essential goal. Men trained in this school 
could not be content with merely general state- 



12 



The Significance of 



ments of the truth by which they lived, and which 
would long since have been wrested from them 
had they held to it with only a broad and, there- 
fore, loose grasp. In the strenuousness of the 
conflict they had not only learned how to state the 
gospel sharply, distinctly, precisely; they had, 
so to speak, lost the power of stating it otherwise 
than with clearness and exactitude and force. As 
well expect the veteran fresh from the wars to 
bungle in his fence ; nay, his blade takes instinc- 
tively the correct attitude of guard, and eye and 
wrist move in such organic harmony that it would 
be only with an effort that either could prove 
false to its fellow. As well expect the mountain- 
eer who has trodden the peaks from infancy to 
stumble heavily over his arretes and passes ; he 
knows not how to do otherwise than to step 
cleanly and surely and firmly, and he instinctively 
plants his feet where they cannot be moved. So, 
when this company of Puritan pastors was gath- 
ered from the parishes of England which they 
had saved for the gospel, and was bidden, 
" Write down this gospel," they could not do 
otherwise than write it down with that rich com- 
pleteness which had nourished their own souls 
and the souls of their flocks in those times of 
conflict and often almost of despair, and with 
that precision in which alone it could preserve its 



the Westminster Standards 13 

integrity and power in the face of the violent 
and insidious foes to the attacks of which it had 
been, in their own experience, exposed. 

It is because the Westminster Standards are the 
product of such men, working under such circum- 
stances, that they embody the gospel of the grace 
of God with a carefulness, a purity, and an ex- 
actness never elsewhere achieved, and come to us 
as, historically, the final fixing in confessional 
language of the principles and teachings of 
evangelical religion. Sixteen centuries of strug- 
gle toward the pure apprehension of the gospel 
lay behind them, culminating in that ultimate 
proclamation of evangelical truth which we call 
the Reformation. More specifically, a hundred 
and fifty years of the development of Reformed 
theology lay behind them, culminating in the 
vindication of the purity of the gospel by the 
Reformed world as over against the Remonstrant 
adulterations. Most specifically of all, there lay 
behind them the half century of the Puritan con- 
flict — a half century of working and polishing the 
jewel of the gospel beneath every hammer that 
the cruelty of men, and every chisel and file that 
the ingenuity of men could devise, until it was 
beaten and cut into the most compact and sharply 
outlined possible expression of the pure gospel 
of the grace of God. It is to these historical 



14 The Significance of 

conditions of their origin that the Westminster 
Standards owe their high significance and value. 
Historically speaking, this is the significance of 
the Westminster Standards as a creed. 



the Westminster Standards 15 



II 

But when we thus say that the historical origin 
of the Westminster Standards operated directly 
to give them peculiar completeness and precision 
as a statement of the gospel, that is as much as 
to say that they appeal to us not more because 
they are historically the ultimate crystallization 
of the principles of evangelical religion, than be- 
cause of the high scientific perfection which they 
attain, considered as a product of human thought, 
in their statement of these principles. The scien- 
tific quality of the Chalcedonian formulary, for 
example, was not due to any speculative interest 
dominating the minds of its framers, nor to any 
singular speculative ability characterizing them, 
but to the thoroughness with which the whole 
problem with which the document deals was 
threshed out in the course of the keen and pro- 
longed controversies which preceded its formula- 
tion and prepared the material for its use. This 
elfect is not best expressed by representing the 
vital processes which go on in a long discussion, 
affecting the basis of the religious life, as simulat- 
ing in their results a scientific product ; it would 
be more nearly correct to conceive the processes 



1 6 The Significance of 

of scientific statement as imitating, and that at a 
considerable interval, the work of organic contro- 
versy. The scientific investigator makes all due 
effort carefully to consider every possible solution 
of the problem brought before him, candidly to 
weigh every conceivable element which may af- 
fect the result, and thoroughly to canvass every 
combination of the elements possible to imagine ; 
and he hopes, by strenuous diligence, watchful 
impartiality and thorough manipulation of his 
material, to reach a result which will do full justice 
to all considerations, and which will therefore 
stand permanently in the face of all criticism. 
But it would seem to be obvious that such a sift- 
ing and weighing cannot go on in a single coolly 
working mind with anything like the same search- 
ing completeness, or ultimate in anything like the 
same perfection of result, as when they take place 
in the caldron of an aroused and deeply moved 
mass of men striving earnestly to comprehend and 
express the elements of their faith. Scientific con- 
struction, therefore, bears to vital processes in 
this sphere, too, very much the same relation as 
in chemical synthesis : not until the manipulation 
of the laboratory can outdo the subtle alchemy of 
life can we expect scientific care to surpass liv- 
ing controversy in producing a truly scientific 
statement of vital truth. Whenever the elements 



the Westminster Standards 17 



cast into the crucible of life include all those that 
enter into the case, and the ferment is violent 
enough and sufficiently long continued, we may ex- 
pect the ultimate eliminations and combinations 
to be in the highest sense natural — that is to run 
on the lines of essential rightness — and the final 
crystallization to be a scientific product of the 
first quality. It is to the fact that just this was 
the process by which the Westminster Standards 
came into being that thev owe their high scien- 
tific character. 

For, consider how richly represented in the re- 
ligious life of Europe during the formative 
period of the Reformed theology, and especially 
in the religious life of Britain during the era 
when the Westminster theology was in prepara- 
tion, were all those constructions which can with 
any show of attractiveness be given to the Chris- 
tian religion. I think it may be said that there 
are only three main forms in which this religion 
may be plausibly presented to the acceptance of 
men ; which can acquire — certainly which have 
ever acquired — a completeness, a self-consistency, 
a power of presentation, such as tend to give them 
any extended empire over men's minds. We 
may, for our convenience, label these the Sacer- 
dotal, the Humanitarian, and the Evangelical 
Gospels ; and it is among them that the battle of 



1 8 The Significance of 



the faith must needs be fought out. Possibly 
there never will be a time when all three will 
not, in one form or another, be represented in 
the world ; certainly up to to-day, and apparently 
as far into the future as our conjecture can pene- 
trate, the supreme task of each has been and will 
continue to be to make good its position as over 
against the other two, and to protect its territory 
from absorption by them. Every attack that has 
ever been made, or apparently can ever be made, 
upon evangelical religion — be it as violent or as 
insidious as it may — will, on analysis, be found 
to be a more or less gross, or a more or less sub- 
tle, manifestation of one or the other of these 
opposing tendencies. No statement of evangel- 
ical religion can stand, therefore, which does not 
differentiate it, and in differentiating protect it, 
from these its two perennial and ever-encroach- 
ing foes. And the statement that does perfectly 
differentiate it from them both will be the high- 
est and most perfect scientific statement of which 
evangelical religion is capable. 

It was thus incident to the historical circum- 
stances of their origin that the Westminster 
Standards should attain the high-water mark of 
a differentiated statement of the elements of 
evangelical religion. For the most complete and 
the most powerful embodiment of the sacerdotal 



the Westminster Standards 19 



tendency is found, of course, in the church of 
Rome ; and never was this tendency so active in 
its propaganda, so impassioned, so filled with the 
courage of intense conviction and utter devotion 
as in those days of the Counter -fief orination, 
when the Jesuit hosts flung themselves into the 
work of recovering every inch of the ground lost 
in the Protestant revolt with a fiery zeal and a 
fertility of resource which remain until to-day the 
wonder and example of the world. And while 
the most complete embodiment of the humani- 
tarian tendency is to be sought in more extreme 
developments, such as for example Socinianism or 
rationalizing naturalism, to the workings of which 
the Reformed Churches were no strangers; its 
most effective elaboration within the limits of 
a church claiming to believe in God and His 
Christ, has ever exhibited itself in that great 
middle system which under the name of Semi- 
Pelagianism early allied itself with Roman ec- 
clesiasticism and in later Romanism became the 
characterizing feature of the Jesuit theology, and 
which broke out afresh in the churches of the Re- 
formation in the forms of Lutheran synergism 
and Remonstrant humanism and sought to poi- 
son the fountains of evangelical religion in their 
sources. The simple enumeration of these facts 
will serve to indicate the fires in which the Re- 



20 The Significance of 



formed theology was forged. It would have 
been a marvel had it emerged from its century 
of conflict with these forces without having 
been beaten into something like shape. There 
was indeed but a single alternative open : that it 
should be crushed out of existence and pounded 
into the dust that is spurned by the foot of man, 
or else that it should come forth from the forg- 
ing compacted into adamant and polished into 
perfection. 

And yet the process of the forging of that ex- 
quisite product of scientific theology which we 
call the Westminster Standards is but half revealed 
when we recite these broad facts. It was under 
those hammers that the Reformed theology was 
beaten into that perfected shape in which it lay 
in the minds of its adherents throughout Europe 
in the seventeenth century. Thus it was fashioned 
into the noble shape in which it was spoken out 
by the assembled Reformed world at the Synod 
of Dort or by the Swiss theologians in their For- 
mula Consensus : and thus it would have been 
spoken out in every centre of Reformed life in all 
Europe, from Scotland to Hungary. It was already 
in a high and true sense p, finished product. But 
in a higher and finer sense there was a finish yet 
to be given it : a finish which could be acquired 
only by passage through the yet more severe 



the Westminster Standards 21 



ordeal that awaited it on English ground. There 
can be no need to recite again the details of the 
story of how narrow the lines were there drawn 
within which he must walk who would preserve 
his good confession : of how sacerdotalism seized 
the reins of the Reformed Church of England 
itself and drove rough-shod over the hearts and 
consciences of her only faithful children ; of how, 
in the dreadful confusion of the times, humani- 
tarian self-assertiveness obtained control of some 
of the finest spiritual sinew in the land and set it 
to demolishing the foundations of the gospel. 
.No wonder that many of the very elect were de- 
ceived and lost the purity of their testimony. 
But no wonder, on the other hand, that those 
who endured, because — how else ? — they saw the 
Invisible One and in the light of that Yision 
were enabled to keep the word of God's patience, 
emerged from the ordeal as from a furnace seven 
times heated, purified and refined and shaking 
the very smell of the smoke from their undefiled 
garments. These were they, who, sitting in solemn 
conclave in the Jerusalem Chamber, gave forth 
that serious expression of the faith by which they 
lived which we call the Westminster Standards : 
and this is the reason why this their enunciation 
of the elements of the gospel of God's grace has 
a perfection of finish upon it elsewhere unattained, 



22 



The Significance of 



— which could not have been equalled by the 
work of any other body of men then on the face 
of the earth, which we can never hope to surpass, 
and which we can lightly lose or rashly cast from 
us only when our grasp upon evangelical religion 
becomes weak or our love for it grows cold. 

It belongs to the very essence of the situation 
that an enunciation of the elements of the gospel, 
springing out of such conditions, should be su- 
premely well guarded from the sides of both its 
most obdurate foes, — between which it was at the 
time, only by the greatest circumspection, pre- 
serving itself from being crushed, as between the 
upper and nether millstones. No wonder, then, 
that even the most cursory reader of the West- 
minster Standards is impressed with the exquisite 
precision and balance of their statements, with the 
clearness and purity with which they bring out 
just the essence of the gospel, and the drastic 
thoroughness with which they separate from it 
every remainder of sacerdotal and humanitarian 
leaven. To read over a chapter or two of the 
Westminster Confession gives one fresh from the 
obscurities and confusions of much modern theo- 
logical discussion a mental feeling very nearly 
akin to the physical sensation of washing one's 
hands and face after a hot hour's work. Here 
the truth is shelled out clean. No doubt there 



the Westminster Standards 23 



are those whose perverted appetites seem to like 
more or less chaff in their bread, and who may 
therefore manage to take offence at this very per- 
fection of statement. And it may be easy to find 
fault with what we may be pleased to call the 
polemic flavor of documents so formulated, and 
to ask whether it is not time to smooth out the 
frowns of war from our countenance and to speak 
out our testimony to the gospel of love with the 
unbroken serenity of a universal peace. As if 
truth could ever be stated without offence to false- 
hood : as if the very essence of definition lay not 
in exclusion: as if it were not self-evident that 
perfect and clean inclusion must always work 
equally perfect and clean exclusion, and the more 
complete and perfect the exclusion the more com- 
plete and perfect the definition. The wall that 
protects the citadel must needs be too narrow in 
its compass to enclose the foeman's camp as well : 
the flask that preserves the precious essence must 
needs be tight enough to shut out corrupting 
germs. The Westminster fathers placed nothing 
in their Standards which they did not think worth 
fighting for, — nay, which they had not already 
been called upon to fight for ; and it marks the 
height of their service that thev have given it a 
form securely guarded on every side, on the well- 
polished surface of which, in particular, the chief- 



24 



The Significance of 



est and most persistent foes of the gospel will seek 
in vain for a foothold. 

So long, then, as the leavens of sacerdotalism 
and humanitarianism — of externality in religion 
and of dependence on flesh — remain, in one form 
or another, the most dangerous perils to which the 
gospel is exposed (and it would seem as if this 
must be as long as human, nature endures), so 
long the statement given the gospel of grace in 
the Westminster Standards must remain the ulti- 
mate scientific enunciation of the principles of 
evangelical religion. In the same sense in which 
the Nicene and Athanasian creeds attained the 
final expression of the doctrine of the Trinity, 
and the Ohalcedonian definition the final expres- 
sion of the doctrine of the Person of Christ, the 
Westminster Standards attained the final expres- 
sion of the elements of evangelical religion. Of 
course, nothing like divine inspiration is attrib- 
uted to any of these documents ; nor is it neces- 
sary to invoke any special or peculiar divine 
superintendence over their production, though he 
who believes in a God will not fail to perceive 
His providential working, nor will he who be- 
lieves in the God of the Bible fail to perceive the 
f ulfilment of His promises, in such supreme pro- 
ducts of human thought on divine things as these. 
What we discover on the surface of these docu- 



the Westminster Standards 25 



merits, however, is the product of historical pro- 
cesses and of historical conditions which not only 
enabled but compelled their framers firmly to 
grasp in all their relations and clearly, cleanly, and 
guardedly to express the truths with which they 
deal. They mark, in a word, epochs in the his- 
tory of human reflection on the truths of the 
gospel — epochs in the attainment and registry of 
special truths ; and they, therefore, in the nature 
of the case, give these special truths their com- 
plete and final scientific expression. All subse- 
quent attempts to restate them can but repeat 
these older statements — which were struck out 
when the fires were hot and the iron was soft — or 
else fall helplessly away from the purity of their 
conceptions or the justness of their language. 
In this fact resides, scientifically speaking, the 
significance of the Westminster Standards as a 
creed. 



26 The Significance of 



III 

It is sufficiently clear that a scientific statement 
of truth, originating in the manner described and 
owing its scientific character not merely to closet 
reflection but to the interaction of the varied in- 
terests and requirements of men's souls, need not 
— nay, cannot — lack in vital quality. It will nec- 
essarily bear in its very fibre a coloring from the 
heart. A product of the intensest intellectual ac- 
tivity, and exhibiting in its forms of statement 
the niceties of scientific construction, it is never- 
theless the product of intellect working only un- 
der impulse from and dictation of the heart, and 
in its very forms of statement will be the vehicle 
of the expression of the needs and attainments 
of the spiritual life. And thus it comes about 
that the Westminster Standards appeal to us not 
merely as, historically, the deposited faith of the 
best age of Evangelical development, and not 
merely as, scientifically, the most thoroughly 
thought out and most carefully guarded state- 
ment ever penned of the elements of evangelical 
religion, but also as, vitally, filled with the ex- 
pressed essence and breathing the finest fragrance 
of spiritual religion. 



the Westminster Standards 27 



They gravely err who picture to themselves the 
fathers to whom we owe the formulation of any 
of the great doctrines of our religion as domi- 
nated by merely speculative interests, or nerved 
for their task mainly by metaphysical considera- 
tions. It has never been so. Restless specula- 
tion and philosophical pretension have ever been 
rather the boasts and, let us frankly admit it, the 
characteristic possessions of the purveyors of 
heresies and the fomenters of those fatal concilia- 
tions with the thought of the world which have, 
from the beginning, been the bane of the Church 
and one of the most serious perils of the gospel. 
It is not only in the infancy of Christianity that 
it has been a true testimony that "Hot many 
wise are called." A certain speculative inertness, 
we might almost say, has marked the Church, 
and even those to whom God, in His providence, 
lias committed the formulation of its treasures 
of truth, until, goaded into action by intolerable 
assaults on the very penetralium of their spiritual 
life, their minds have taken fire from their hearts 
and risen to compass and proclaim the elements 
of the higher wisdom of God. The accents which 
smite our ears, out of our creeds, with such tre- 
mendous emphasis do not indicate the crisp, cold, 
sharp movements of mere intellection ; they are 
the pulsations of great hearts heaving in emotion 



28 The Significance of 



and rising to the assertion of the precious truth 
by which they live. If we read them as merely 
speculative discriminations, the fault lies in us, 
not in them. It is because our hearts cannot, like 
theirs, stand up and answer, " We have felt ! " * 
The scoffer who mocks, for example, at the Ni- 
cene fathers wrangling over a mere iota in fram- 
ing their definition of the Trinitarian relation, f 
but uncovers the poverty of his own spiritual life 
and betrays the shallowness of his own religious 
experience. He that knows his Lord, that has 
in his periods of despair fled to His sheltering 
arms and in his periods of comfort rested upon 
His bosom, I do not say will not, I say cannot, 
abate one jot or one tittle of his passionate asser- 
tion of His divine majesty. We treat these clean- 
ly cut and nicely balanced phrases as if they were 
intellectualistic scales weighing minute differences 
of merely speculative import, only because, and 

* u A warm tli within the breast would melt 
The freezing reason's colder part, 
And like a man in wrath the heart 

Stood up and answer'd, 4 1 have felt ! ' " 

— In Memoriam, cxxiv. 

tThis is the difference between the orthodox formula 
{blLooxxrios) and the semi-Arian (dfioiovo-ios) ; the decided 
Arian affirmed erepoofoios. Of course, the whole doctrine of 
the Trinity in Unity and of the proper Deity of Christ re- 
sides in the iota. 



the Westminster Standards 29 



only so long as, we have not vitally experienced 
the spiritual truths which underlie them, to which 
they give just expression and for which they form 
the bulwarks. " Xothing could be more mis- 
taken,'' says Professor Sabatier in one of his 
lapses into sound reason,* "than to represent the 
fathers of the councils or the members of the 
synods as theorists, or even as professional theo- 
logians, brought together in conference by specu- 
lative zeal alone in order to resolve metaphysical 
enigmas. They were men of action, not of spec- 
ulation ; courageous priests and pastors who 
thought of their work as like that of soldiers in 
open battle, and who were ready to die as one 
dies for his country." The creeds have been 
given to the Church, not by philosophers but by 
the shepherds of the flocks, who loved the sheep; 
not in a speculative but in a practical interest ; 
not to advance or safeguard what we may speak of 
as merely intellectual, but distinctively spiritual 
needs : and to every seeing eye — that is, to every 
eve open to spiritual vision— they bear their cor- 
responding appearance. 

Of no creed is all this more true than of the 
Westminster Standards. Perhaps I may even 
venture to say, of no creed is it true in an equal 
measure as of the Westminster Standards. Men 
*Bi8cc>urs sur V evolution des dogmes, pp. 23. 24 



30 



The Significance of 



of learning they were, no doubt, who framed these 
standards ; men of speculative power and philo- 
sophical grasp ; men who were the heirs of all the 
Christian ages, and who had consciously entered 
into their inheritance; in whose minds were 
stored the well-ordered fruits of serious study of 
the whole product of Christian thought and liv- 
ing up to their time.* But their chief claim to 
greatness does not lie in this. " Some of the 
Assembly," is the testimony of one who, though 
not in sympathy with them, strives hard to do 
them justice — "some of the Assembly were 
great men ; most of them were sincerely good." f 
They were above and before all else — and that too 
consciously to themselves — men of God, men of 
strenuous and devout lives, who had known what 
it was to suffer for Christ's sake, and who spared 
not themselves in the work of His vineyard. 
They were, in one word, just a picked body of 

* u It was an age of great religious knowledge, and now 
for thirty years of free and violent discussion." — Marsden : 
History of the Later Puritans, p. 53. " The Presbyterian party 
[in the Assembly, i. e. , the great majority] were not ordinary 
men, nor men of fickle minds. . . . Most of them left 
to the world some records of ministerial ability, of solid learn- 
ing, and of zeal and piety, which time has not destroyed." — 
Ibid., p. 64. On the knowledge and power displayed by the 
Westminster Divines in the work of preaching, see p. 88. 

f Marsden ; History of the Later Puritans, p. 106. 



the Westminster Standards 31 

Puritan pastors — u the flower of the Puritan 
clergy," as the secular historian calls them * — the 
best men of the best age of British Protestantism. 
And they were met together not to air their con- 
ceits, but to save the good ship of the Church of 
England alike from the rocks of sacerdotalism 
and the shoals of humanitarianism on one or the 
other of which it seemed likely to founder ; and 
above all, to speak out heartily and without cir- 
circumlocution, all the words of the Divine life. 
It results, therefore, from the very nature of the 
case that it is above everything else a religious 
document which they have given us — a docu- 
ment phrased in theological language, no doubt, 
as all religious instruments must be, for such is 
the language of religion when seeking to express 
itself in terms of thought — but a document 
which, in the highest and most distinctive sense 
of those words, is a religious document ; a docu- 
ment transfused with the very spirit of the age 
of religious revival which gave it birth, and bear- 
ing to every age which will receive it the spirit 
of devotion enshrined in its bosom. Speaking of 
the Puritans of London, one of the soberest of 
historians is forced to give utterance to the ad- 

* S. R. Gardiner : History of the Great Civil War, I., 272. 
" It [the Assembly of Divines] comprised the flower of the 
Puritan clergy 



32 



The Significance of 



miring cry that " aiming to be a saint, each man 
unconsciously became a hero." * The description 
may be applied in an eminent sense to the divines 
of the Westminster Assembly. If they have 
become intellectual heroes to us, as we wonder 
over the solidity and circumspection of their the- 
ological structure, it is not because their prime 
aim was scholastic. They wrote these definitions 
aiming before all things to be saints : is it strange 
that we see the saint through the theologian and 
have our hearts warmed by the contact ? Certain 
it is that the Westminster Standards have a spir- 
itual significance to us which falls in no wise 
short of their historical and scientific significance. 

Open these standards where you will and you 
will not fail to feel the throb of an elevated and 
noble spiritual life pulsing through them. They 
are not merely a notably exact scientific statement 
of the elements of the gospel : they are, in the 
strictest sense of the words, the very embodiment 
of the gospel. They not only know what God 
is ; they know God : and they make their readers 
know Him— know Him in His infinite majesty, 
in His exalted dominion, in His unlimited sov- 
ereignty, in the immutability of His purpose and 
His almighty power and universal providence, but 
know Him also in that strangest, most incompre- 
* Marsden : History of the Later Puritans, p. 111. 



the Westminster Standards 33 

liensible of all His perfections, the unfathomable- 
ness of His love. Their description of Him tran- 
scends the just limits of mere definition and swells 
into a psean of praise— praise to Him who is 
" most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, 
abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving in- 
iquity, transgression and sin, the re warder of them 
that diligently seek Him." And how profound 
their knowledge is of the heart of man — its prone- 
ness to evil, its natural aversion to spiritual good, 
its slowness of response to spiritual influence, the 
deviousness of its path even under the leading of 
the Holy Ghost. But, above all, they know, with 
a fulness of apprehension which startles and in- 
structs and blesses the reader, the ways of God 
with the errant souls of men — how He has con- 
descended to open the way to them of having 
fruition of Him as their blessedness and reward, 
how He has redeemed them unto Himself in the 
blood of His Son, and how He deals with them, 
as only a loving Father may, in disciplining and 
fitting them for the heavenly glory. Where 
elsewhere may we find more vitally set forth the 
whole circle of experience in the Christian life — 
what conversion is and how God operates in bring- 
ing the soul to knowledge of Him and faith in its 
Saviour, what are the joys of justifying grace and 
of adoption into the family of God, and what the 



34 The Significance of 



horrors of those temporary lapses that lie in wait 
for unwary steps, and what the inconceivable 
tenderness of God's gracious dealings with the 
stumbling and trembling spirit until He brings it 
safely home ? Who can read those searching 
chapters on Perseverance and Assurance without 
feeling his soul burn within him, or without ex- 
perience of a new influx of courage ^and patience 
for the conflicts of life ? It is not a singular 
experience which Dr. Thornwell records, when he 
sets down in his journal his thanksgiving to God 
for this blessed Confession. "I bless God," he 
writes, " for that glorious summary of Christian 
doctrine contained in our noble Standards. It has 
cheered my soul in many a dark hour, and sus- 
tained me in many a desponding moment." We 
do not so much require as delight, with consen- 
tient mind, in his testimony, when he declares 
that he knows of " no uninspired production in 
any language, or of any denomination, that for 
richness of matter, soundness of doctrine, scrip- 
tural expression and edifying tendency can for a 
moment enter into competition with the West- 
minster Confession and Catechisms." * The West- 
minster Standards, in a word, are notable monu- 
ments of the religious life as well as of theological 

* B. M. Palmer : The Life and Letters of James Henley 
Thornwell, D.D., LL.D., pp. 162 and 165. 



the Westminster Standards 35 

definition, and, speaking from the point of view of 
vital religion, this is their significance as a creed. 

I have sought, fathers and brothers, nothing 
more than to indicate, with a brevity suitable to 
the nature of the occasion, what may be thought 
to be the chief sources of the significance of the 
Westminster Standards as a creed — to suggest in 
broad outline why, after two centuries and a half, 
they are still enshrined in the affections of the 
churches which have been blessed by their posses- 
sion, and why we feel impelled to gather here to-day 
to express before the world our sense of benefits 
received from them and of satisfaction in them. 
It would be easy to enlarge upon the theme. It 
would be easy to show, for example, how freely 
the best thought of the best age of Protestantism 
was poured into them; how fully and genially 
they represent the consensus of Reformed doc- 
trine in its most developed and most catholic 
form ; how strictly they are held in every defini- 
tion to the purity of the Biblical conceptions and 
enunciations of truth. These and similar grounds 
of appeal to our admiration and acceptance may 
be considered, however, to be implicitly included 
in what has been broadly adduced, and we may 
agree that the hold of the Westminster Standards 



36 The Westminster Standards 

upon our hearts and suffrages is due proximately 
to the facts that we see in them, historically 
speaking, the final crystallization of the very es- 
sence of evangelical religion — scientifically speak- 
ing, the richest and most precise and best guarded 
statement possessed by man, of all that enters 
into evangelical religion and of all that must be 
safeguarded if evangelical religion is to persist 
in the world — religiously speaking, the very ex- 
pressed essence of vital religion. Surely blessed 
are the churches which feed upon this meat! 
Surely the very possession of Standards like these 
differentiates the fortunate churches which have 
inherited them as those best furnished for the 
word and work of the Christian proclamation and 
the Christian life. May God Almighty infuse 
their strength into our bones and their beauty 
into our flesh, and enable us to justify our inherit- 
ance by unfolding into life, in all its complete- 
ness and richness and divinity, the precious gospel 
which they have enfolded for us in their protect- 
ing envelope of sound words ! 




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